WASHINGTON -- For more than a century, the study of dinosaurs has been limited to fossilized bones. Now, researchers have recovered 70 million-year-old soft tissue, including what may be blood vessels and cells, from a Tyrannosaurus rex in Montana.
If scientists can isolate proteins from the material, they may be able to learn new details of how dinosaurs lived, said lead
researcher Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University.
It was recovered dinosaur DNA -- the blueprint for life -- that was featured in the fictional recreation of the ancient animals in the book and film "Jurassic Park."
The soft tissues were recovered from the thighbone of a T. rex, known as MOR 1125, that was found in a sandstone formation in Montana. The dinosaur was about 18 years old when it died.
The bone was broken when it was removed from the site. Schweitzer and her colleagues then analyzed the material inside the bone.
"The vessels and contents are similar in all respects to blood vessels recovered from ... ostrich bone," they reported in a paper bring published Friday in the journal Science.
Because evidence has accumulated in recent years that modern birds descended from dinosaurs, Schweitzer said she chose to compare the dinosaur remains with those of an ostrich, the largest bird available.
Brooks Hanson, a deputy editor of Science, noted that there are few examples of soft tissues, except for leaves or petrified wood, that are preserved as fossils, just as there are few discoveries of insects in amber or humans and mammoths in peat or ice.
John R. Horner of the Museum of the Rockies at Montana State University, said the discovery is "a fantastic specimen," but probably is not unique. Other researchers might find similarly preserved soft tissues if they split open the bones in their collections, said Horner, a co-author of the paper.
Most museums, he said, prefer to keep their specimens intact.
Schweitzer said that after removing the minerals from the specimen, the remaining tissues were soft and transparent and could be manipulated with instruments.
The bone matrix was stretchy and flexible, she said. Also, there were long structures like blood vessels. What appeared to be individual cells were visible.
She did not know if they were blood cells. "They are little round cells," Schweitzer said.
They acquired the tissue from inside the bone of the dinosaur?
